End Of The Year Candidate: Serapis - S/T

Somehow, calling Serapis melodic metalcore doesn’t quite capture the oddities in their sound. There are guitar melodies, but they’re far from being stolen from Sweden. Their single note breakdowns sometimes feels a bit closer to Isis than any other simple metalcore. The slight relation to slower bands is more than likely due to the choice of typically slightly slower tempos, as Serapis feels like they’ve been put under sedation, then attempted to play at top speed.

The bulk of the material occurs at a speed a hair slower than mid-paced grove. The most memorable song, and also the same song being pushed almost as a single is “Nancy Leper” the slowest song on the album. Could this make Serapis the melodic metalcore answer to Morbid Angel?

Vocals consist mostly of a high slightly garbled shriek, which might remind some of Jacob Bannon of Converge. Every now and then, clean singing graces the tracks, usually very low in the mix, which gives more of a band feeling as a whole, rather than having clean vocals shoved in your face. The clean vocals at first might remind some of emo, but the closer one listens, the further from emo those clean vocals become.

While melodic metalcore as a whole is already over saturated, Serapis provides a huge creative left turn. Comparing Serapis to other melodic metalcore bands won’t yield too many similarities, yet they fill the prerequisite by having a significant amount of melody and breakdowns, making them somehow an odd fit.

8/10

Serapis